How To Travel The World & Pay No Tax - Nomad Capitalist

How do you describe what you do for work when you meet someone at a cocktail party?

I like to say that I help people go where you're treated best. Those are five magic words. I learned them from my father at a very young age. He gave me a permission slip, I did not have to stick around where I'm from. Um, I didn't have to stick around and take care of my parents 'cause they didn't want their kids taking care of them. They wanted their kids to go where the best opportunities were, and he thought back in the 1990s where I grew up in the United States that there would be better opportunities by the time I got around to being in business. And so, what I've discovered is if you live in the United States or if you live in a country like it, you're probably paying way too much in tax. I'm not saying you should pay zero, but you're probably paying too much for what you're getting. Um, there's probably some things holding you back. Uh, I think what we're seeing now is there's a lot of opportunities in business around the world, and increasingly this multi-polarity where the US is pitted against other places, and so there's gonna be a choice, which market do you want to sell to? Uh, and so we help people at Nomad Capitalists reduce taxes, become dual citizens, find opportunities around the world that most people don't talk about. Uh, 'cause I'm a pretty contrarian guy, and I think that what we think is the best is often not.

It's strange, having read and listened to a good bit of your work, it's... (laughs) From first principles, it's kind of weird that people presume, "Well, this is the place that I was born, so this is the place that I'm supposed to work and live and die and bank and pay taxes and date." All of these things.

Date. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, uh, you know, I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in the US, uh, right on the lake and right across the lake from Canada. And I look and I say, "What if, you know, I'd been born right across that lake?" I mean, in the grand scheme of things, that lake is a pretty small, pretty small thing. And if you're a Canadian, uh, you can leave your country and you can leave your tax burden behind for one thing. You don't have to follow Canadian regulations when you live overseas, uh, you have a passport that for years... I mean, it's, it's the joke, uh, that people respect you a lot more and people are more open to giving you a bank account in other countries. Just take, like, life as a global citizen's a lot easier. Life just as a Canadian traveling is a lot easier. Um, you know, people aren't picking on you. And to say that you're born that close to where your identity would've been different, I mean, to me just shows, uh, the miracle of birth. But not only, you know, if you... The movie Midnight in Paris talked about, you know, were we born in the wrong part of, you know, Earth's history, you know? Would you rather have been born 50 years ago? You know, we can't change when we were born, but we can certainly change where we were born. And if we weren't born in a place that we want, um, we can change that. I also happen to think, as my father said, sure, when I was born in 1984, the United States, according to the sur- the studies that do this, it was the best place to be born, but there wasn't a lot of competition. I'm talking to you from Malaysia. I think it's the best value destination in the world for someone who can work from anywhere, and you would've never even been talking about it in 1984, but you can talk about it today. And so there's a lot more competition. The world changes, the world evolves. And even if you were born in the right place, maybe it's not the right place today.